New Job -- Cloud Computing Futures

October 20, 2009

After 26 months on the Cloud Directory / Live ID team, it is now time for me to move on in my career at Microsoft.

At the end of the month, I will be moving to a new role as a Technical Program Manager on a small incubation team in the Cloud Computing Futures team (CCF) within the eXtreme Computing Group (XCG) at Microsoft Research (MSR) on the Redmond campus.

Looking back, I have been involved with lots of things with my current team and we have covered a lot of ground in the last 2 years! For me, this has personally included ....

6 major product features ( WLID Web Auth, WLID Delegated Auth, OpenID CTP, Microsoft Services Connector, Federation Trust Provisioning, and Consent v2.0 [watch this space!] )
5 product release cycles (if you count MSC 1.0 Beta)
4 GPM's
3 line managers
2 organization names (Live ID -> Cloud Directory)
2 different buildings (or three, if you count the "rebranding" from Bldg 119 to "Studio E"!)
attending and/or presenting at various conferences: 2 TechEd's, 2 TechReady's, 1 PDC, 1 MIX, 1 DIDW and 1 IIW
watching third-party developer integrations grow to over 60,000 AppIDs compared to less than 500 when I joined the team

I have personally learned a great deal from working with everyone on the Windows Live / Cloud Directory / Windows Live ID teams about building world-class web services at truly Internet scale - or more accurately "Windows Live / Live ID scale" which I have to say is another notch even higher!
Handling more than 500 million active users and 1.6 billion auth transactions per day is no small task.

It has also been a truly eye-opening experience for me to have been involved with a team that has had such a pivotal role in the evolution of cloud identity for Microsoft's rapidly expanding online services business.
Especially memorable was the keynote demo of Microsoft Services Connector by Dave Thompson at PDC-2008 starting around 74:18, with a live production demo of integration with CRM Online at 83:39 thru 92:20 and with installation of MSC from 84:42 to 85:43 [yes - just one minute!]

I would like to wish the Windows Live and Cloud Directory teams well for the current work towards Windows Live Wave 4 and beyond. I am just not allowed to tell you any of the cool details yet! :)

Finally, here is some background info on the work that my new teem is doing: